Is Love a Suitable Engine for my Project?

[Frimbleglim]

Greetings All. I am currently trying to choose a game engine for a game I have been planning to make for a few years.

The game is a simple RPG (roll playing game). I want there to be a character walking around a series of 2d maps (leg animation optional), a dialog system similar to that used in the Bethesda game morrowind for talking to characters and a turn based combat system similar to that used in JRPGs (Japanese roll playing games). ie combat will be on a separate 'combat' screen. This will require random number generation for attack effects. I want to simulate a deck of (playing) cards for a spell casting system. I also want there to be a save feature of some kind.

I'm not asking anyone to actually help me with this but I want to know if Love is a suitable engine for this kind of functionality. I have looked at several engines both propriety and open source and most seem far too advanced for my limited programming skills and the limited scope of the game I want to make. Other engines I have looked at include Unity (seems excessive for a 2d game), Unreal Engine (ditto). RPG maker (seems a little limited), and game maker (possibly would work but would rather use something that allows me to code in linux).

Love Looks great! I have written a few simple programs in the engine today and yesterday. But please tell me if there is something I am trying to do that will be unreasonably difficult if I use Love as opposed to some other engine.

In case it matters: My previous programming experience is mostly limited to basic web development (PHP, HTML, CSS, a little javascript) and a few different versions of basic. My OS of choice is Linux Mint.

Thanks for reading!

[Sir_Silver]

Love is easy to use and good enough for all of my personal needs. I don't think that any of the things you mentioned you wouldn't be able to do with love - or just about any other 2D game engine for that matter (not that I've checked though). Most likely, love as your engine of choice will not be a bottleneck in your development.

[bgordebak]

LÖVE is totally suitable for your project. I think there are some projects going on similar to yours.

You'll be surprised how easy and flexible Lua is. I think your project wouldn't take years to complete if you put in enough time.

Cheers!

[raidho36]

LÖVE is fully functional and extensible engine, and it's been used in making commercial games. You can program anything you want, and there's vast scope of existing libraries if you'd rather not invent every wheel yourself. Using LuaJIT's FFI you can hook up binary dynamic link libraries, although it only works fast on desktop where compilation is enabled.

[Zireael]

Frimbleglim, I am making a roguelike/RPG hybrid in LOVE. Out of all the features you listed, I don't have saving implemented yet (but there are several serialization libraries that help with it) nor do I use playing cards.

Check out ROTLove library for randomization, and STI for drawing the map.

You can also look up Possession 2, it's a roguelike done in LOVE. I'd recommend rm-code's game too, if the repo wasn't set to private currently.

[Frimbleglim]

Thanks for the replies everyone. Also thanks for the tips. I'm looking forward to getting started.

[peterrust]

I want there to be a character walking around a series of 2d maps (leg animation optional)

Check out ROTLove library for randomization, and STI for drawing the map.

If you're just doing static maps (like those created in Tiled), then you can use STI by itself, but if you want to get into random map generation (like the procedurally-generated worlds in minecraft or terraria, or the randomly-generated dungeons/rooms/mazes that the ROTLove library generates or the https://github.com/SiENcE/astray library generates), then you'll need a bit of code that generates the tables that you need to feed into the STI library -- the Tiled Lua format. I recently wrote a tutorial, https://github.com/prust/sti-pg-example, that documents this format, with example code and helper functions for generating it. It won't take you all the way, but it should be a good starting point if this is the direction you want to go.

[xNick1]

I started working with Love a couple months ago.
I do web dev for a living (.NET/C#, Javascript, Html, css, sql and stuff).
I'm having fun so far.
The framework is easy to use, and it was exactly what I was looking for since I have no time to learn a gui editor.
I'm not using many libraries because sometimes reinventing the wheel is easier than learning a full featured lib.
Lua is quite easy, and you can do everything with tables.
No need to learn arrays, lists, dictionaries etc. Just tables =) (Remember that table indexes starts from 1 instead of 0 :grrrrrr:)
As far as you can manage to give every entity a different class and let them have their own load, update and draw methods you're almost good to go.

There are some resources on github, and the cool thing is that you can see the source code of every .love file uploaded in the games section of the forum.

And those guys here are fantastic, stick with us =)

[yougetagoldstar]

I'm currently working on a classic RPG, like what you mentioned. I too am just starting with love2d. Right now I just have my character loaded up and walking around a map, which is just a 2d image, and so far so good. my character faces down when you move down, up when you move up, right left, vice versa, and flips back to my starting idle frame. while learning as much about love to get to this point, (watching and reading tutorials) I ran by some demonstrations that made me think... "hey, with this I could create an interaction with an npc, or... with this I could create a menu system." nothing has been clearly outlined for me, but even without having someone tell me explicitly that I can do everything I want to do, it really seems that love2d can do all these things, you can kinda tell, (if not by looking at all the example love2d games), and I can't wait to get to the point where I can confirm these things for everyone (i really hope i get to that point).

I was a bit skeptical because I could't find many big rockstar commercial games made with love. only commercial game I found was move or die... but hey, all i need is to see what that game can do to understand what love2d can do. All that's left is to sort of rearrange these features to create a game that works for you. and hey, maybe you'll be that person that creates that rockstar game with love2d.

[xNick1]

I've seen many nice games made with Love.
Depths Of Limbo is very nice, same thing for Mari0, Oh My Giraffe, trainsported, bussard and many others.
Here's a list of famous Love games focusing on the ones you can find on steam: http://missingsentinelsoftware.com/notable-love-games

Love is a "full" featured framework.
You may miss a gui editor and some tools which only an engine includes, but Love is very small in size and runs (and allows you to develop) on many platforms.

I never followed many tutorials, the fun thing is that you have to think about how to do something, and then you're like "Yeah, I can do that and then that and it will work out", no one is telling you how to do things.
The challange is to keep things simple I guess xD